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Everything posted by asdfasdf

Ok, so I drew some more for fun. This really makes you appreciate the work of the Sierra guys.
(edit: by the way, it's ok, I know I'm not much of an artist. I'm just a programmer that likes playing around with stuff)
edit 2: oh, and there's also an easter egg in it now... :D

Yeah I was using AGI studio, an old version (1.2.4) that could run in Linux. It took a little while to get the hang of editing the history without accidentally wiping everything out, or nuking an important drawing step that took a few minutes to do. And figuring out that if you do a fill and it escapes and ends up filling half the screen, then you actually need to go through all the steps and probably fix up one of the really early steps, you can't just delete the last step. I'm guessing there's an optimisation to remove duplicate drawing instructions, so if you've got lots of drawing steps it can take a fair bit of hunting. And there's no undo, and to me the way steps are deleted was counter-intuitive, so I kept accidentally making 'off by one' errors with step deleting :) Like if you had step 3 selected, and clicked delete, then it would actually delete step 4 (or something like that).
Once you get the hang of it, it's ok.

Those are awesome! During the KS I started trying to make the SpaceVenture dome in AGI just for fun (was playing around with it for the first time). The vector graphics and priority system certainly take a bit of getting used to. Anyway, I only got about part of the way through it before I realised how long it would take me to do the whole thing :) Also, it can be pretty draining to motivation when you mess up a colour fill and have to try to fix up the drawing instructions without destroying everything and having to start again :)
Anyway, here's where I got up to (posted in the pledgequest thread):
I actually got a lot further a couple of times but had to start over to get the priorities right etc. :(

Ok, got MIDI working. Digging through strace output I could see it was using Allegro. Allegro can use DIGMID if you set up a patches.dat file, by following the instructions here http://alleg.sourceforge.net/digmid.html (for .sf2 soundfonts, this means downloading Allegro 4 and building the pat2dat tool). Through strace I could see it was looking for patches.dat in /usr/share/allegro (although you could change this with a allegro.cfg file). So no soft synth / raw MIDI shenanigans required (although there's probably some way to make this work too).

Ok, because I like a challenge, I thought I'd try and get the MIDI working in Linux. So I did
modprobe snd-virmidi
ln -s /dev/snd/midiC1D0 /dev/snd/midiC0D0
(get fluidsynth running through qsynth)
aconnect 20:0 128:0 # connect virtual raw MIDI to synth
# test out the raw MIDI device
(echo -ne '\x90\x3c\x7f'; sleep 0.5; echo -ne '\x3c\x00') > /dev/snd/midiC0D0
And that successfully plays a single note. But when I fire up pledgequest, no MIDI :(
For added hilarity, I tried "cat /dev/urandom > /dev/snd/midiC0D0" and got some interesting sounds that required restarting the synth :) I ran "lsof" and confirmed that ags was opening /dev/snd/midiC1D0, and using aconnect to connect the raw MIDI port to another raw midi port, I was able to snoop on the data being sent to it. Hex dump looks like the following:
# cat /dev/snd/midiC1D1 > hexdump
(run pledgequest, quit, Ctrl-C this)
# hexdump -C hexdump
00000000 b0 7b 00 |.{.|
00000003
So it sends something, but not much. On an unrelated note, the sound effects seem a bit glitchy too (last part of each sound loops until the next sound effect is played). At least the outro music plays :)

Thanks for doing the Linux port s_d! The linux build worked great except no MIDI joy. Any tips? Should I be able to play MIDIs in mplayer, say? (because I can't, I have to use timidity to play MIDIs). Do I need some sort of software synth daemon?
For fun, I tried to run the exe through WINE but it killed my X-Windows and I had to Ctrl-Alt-Bksp